Savile Row Arrives Stateside

Huntsman, a 168-year-old British tailoring institution, sets up shop in New York City

- Troy Patterson

Zachary Peck steps into a gently burbling cocktail party at the Huntsman tailoring headquarters in New York wearing a button-front shirt and Irish linen trousers. Tall and lean, with narrow shoulders and scrubby blond hair, the Angeleno looks every bit the 25-year-old part-time model that he is—a handsome illustration of nonchalance.

It takes only a moment, though, before a neatly suited Huntsman employee speeds forward to slip a beautifully cut, bright blue single-breasted silk-and-linen blazer over his shoulders. Immediately elegant, the young gentleman is recognizable as someone else: the dashing grandson of screen legend Gregory Peck and an inheritor of his impeccable dress sense.

It’s wonderful what a bit of suiting can do, or at least that’s what Belgian financier Pierre Lagrange is hoping to convince Americans. In 2016 he brought his Savile Row tailoring outfit, Huntsman & Sons Ltd., to the U.S., opening a small appointment only shop in an apartment building on West 57th Street in Manhattan. Since the 1800s, Huntsman and other bespoke foreign tailors have undertaken yearly tours of the U.S., but in an unprecedented development, Lagrange established a permanent home away from home. “The whole idea was, OK, we’ve got a lot of American clients who can’t come to London as much as they should,” says the long-haired hedge funder. “They will come 5 or 10 times more often to us in New York.” Think of it from the client’s point of view: the privacy, the convenience, the savings on Gulfstream jet fuel.